Analysis: Why did EPA delay notifying data breach victims?

By Amber Corrin

Aug 24, 2012

Although it's disturbing enough that about 8,000 people had their personal information compromised when a virus attacked Environmental Protection Agency computers, what is really eyebrow-raising is that EPA didn't notify the victims for several months.

The breach happened in March; EPA alerted the people involved in August.

Tanya Forsheit, a founding partner at InfoLawGroup, told the U.K.'s PC Advisor that there is no single standard for notifying people potentially affected by a breach.

"State and federal breach notification laws govern how quickly an organization is required to notify affected individuals of a breach," Forsheit said. "Those deadlines depend on the particular law involved. The 46 state laws are all different, and the federal laws that do exist…are different still."

The compromised EPA servers contained data related to the Superfund program, the hazardous-waste cleanup effort mandated in 1980. The program is almost entirely managed by contractors. The data — including Social Security numbers, bank account information and home addresses — was exposed after an e-mail attachment with a virus was opened on a computer with access privileges to the breached servers, according to reports.

The breach raises questions about the cybersecurity measures in place at the agency and at agencies throughout government. Technology and policy are critical to the success of any security effort, in addition to education and training, experts say.

“We cannot just have policy-based approaches to cybersecurity; it has to be technology-based, too,” said Tony Busseri, CEO of IT security firm Route1. “If we rely upon the human condition — i.e., we expect someone to adhere to a policy — and that’s the only protection we have, we’re going to have failure. By nature, people are prone to making errors.”

That concern isn’t limited to EPA or to this specific incident. It’s something that must be considered as the federal government increasingly looks to telework and bring-your-own-device policies, Busseri said.

“We’ve forgotten in today’s world some of the simple rules of dealing with data. As soon as we allow data to go beyond the network perimeter, all the firewalls and monitoring tools are rendered useless,” he said. “It comes down to cybersecurity 101.”

Breaches involving government computers seem to be on the rise. Agencies reported 13,000 incidents in 2010 and 15,500 in 2011, according to a report in the Federal Times.